nettime What if a work of net.art sold for $34 million?
What would the world be like if Roy Ascott's La Plissure du Texte (1983) sold at auction for $34.2 million instead of Gerhard RIchter's ?Abstraktes Bild?? In what sort of world (and artworld) would that be possible? I asked this question a couple days ago on Facebook and it has generated some interesting responses, which I'd like to share in order to get more feedback on this little mind experiment from Nettime readers. Here are a few responses, anonymized but in order, so far: 1. And that money would be distributed, like the artwork. 2. It would be a world in which people would be much more aware of the importance of play, just imagine 'playtime' at work, crawling around, turning over your desk, pretending it is a spaceship in which your colleagues begin a journey! A moment to delve into the inner narratives of the symbolic. It would be a world in which creativity was valued more than it is feared. 3. Good call. I really like this what the world would be if starting from an art auction, you are suggesting a way out the decadence in the art world and the impotence of art production. Thanks for this uplifting imagination exercise. 4. Well, the Richter they can carry home. What would they be carrying home with 'La Plissure ...? 5. I'm not sure it would mean a darn thing. Art sales in the tens of millions are so far out on the thin tail of the bell curve that they say very little about the mean. I do wish folks would stop picking on Richter though. He's a great artist, and it's not his fault the wealthy have decided to use his work as the coin of the realm. ES: For La Plissure... to have an exchange value of $30+ million would demand a complete retooling of not only the commercial artworld but a major overhaul of cultural values. I'm not picking on Richter, merely using him as an example of the commercial artworld's infatuation with retrograde forms of practice that are out of touch with aesthetic developments (to say nothing of techno-cultural developments) since the 1960s. Over four decades ago Kosuth wrote that Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That's because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. By this logic, Richter might be a great painter, but he is not a great artist. On the other hand, La Plissure du Texte is a far superior work of art than any painting since 1969, when Kosuth called the bluff and the jig was over. 5.2 So a quote over four decades old is authoritative for art today? I think we've gotten beyond end-of-art thinking where the only legitimate art is art about art. Kosuth's way treats art like a star collapsing in on itself and becoming a black hole. All gravity and no light. 6. So a quote over four decades old is authoritative for art today? I think we've gotten beyond end-of-art thinking where the only legitimate art is art about art. Kosuth's way treats art like a star collapsing in on itself and becoming a black hole. All gravity and no light. 3.2 I believe time will tell. The sword is double edged, investments in art aren't good just because they move market value *today*. Actually, they might be epic fails as well - and that's what is happening all over - as we speak - to several big capitals. So that is pretty consequent with the times we are living isn't it? 'nuff said, lemme order that copy of PdT now to get it signed by Roy ... oh gosh I'm so materialistically OT tonight. Must be the visit to the Van Gogh last sunday. ES: In terms of use value, defined as the cultural capital accrued by a collector today within the contemporary commercial art world, Richter has a great deal to offer, hence the high price tag, i.e. its exchange value. However, an artwork potentially has value outside of classical economic theory: what it contributes to a continuously unfurling history of art (that is perpetually retold from ever changing future perspectives). Let's call that its posterity value. The history of western art from contrapposto to conceptual art celebrates innovation and embraces work that challenges the status quo. In this regard, Kosuth's perspective is as insightful today as it was 40 years ago. I suspect that a Richter painting has little posterity value, whereas I suspect that Ascott's Plissure has potentially great posterity value. In other words, at some point in the future, Ascott will be generally recognized as having made a more valuable contribution to the history of art than Richter. The disparity between use value and posterity value, and between posterity value and exchange value, is at issue. Over time, as posterity value is more firmly established and renegotiated from various present perspectives, it becomes closely
nettime Regarding Asia/Cn/Hk domain name Internet Keyword
Dear Manager, (If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO,Thanks) This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly deal with the domain name registration in China and Asia. We received an application from Tianhong Ltd on May 10, 2013. They want to register amsterdamtime as their internet keyword and China/Asia/Hongkong (CN/ASIA/HK) domain names. But after checking it, we find this name conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not? Best Regards, Jim General Manager Shanghai Office (Head Office) 3002, Nanhai Building, No. 854 Nandan Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai 200070, China Tel: +86 216191 8696 Mobile: +86 1870199 4951 Fax: +86 216191 8697 Web: www.ygregistry.cn # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
But isn't it all just a bit Luddite? What kind of work were all those Kodak employees doing? Putting transparencies in plastic boxes to post to the owners. It's just a rearrangement of social labour, like when Manchester Actually a substantial chunk of their work was related to the military-industrial complex -- as photography (especially unusual techniques and processes) was crucial to early (airborne) surveillance, global mapping, and weapons research. JH -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD Watching the Tao rather than watching the Dow! http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
On 13/05/13 18:11, Keith Hart wrote: Thanks for posting this. It's a great interview and I downloaded the book onto my Kindle. Lanier's ideas about the middle class as an artificial product of modernity are interesting That sounds similar to Paul Graham's interesting opinions about unions - http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class (2)
I'm sorry, I should have given the source for my observation about the return of high-wage and low-wage jobs in the US, compared to the devastating loss of mid-wage jobs. It is here: http://bigstory.ap.org/interactive/interactive-great-reset It's an amazing little animated graph, dated 2013. What you have to do is click on replay recoveries and then on the arrow below. You will see that 42 months after the recovery of 2009, only 85,380 mid-wage jobs were regained, out of 3,764,120 mid-wage jobs lost during the so-called great recession of 2007-09. The net job loss in the mid-wage range was 3,678,740. A very big number. In the high-wage sector, 908,990 jobs were lost, but 1,011,210 were created: that's a net gain for high-wage earners. In the low-wage sector, 2,803,390 were lost, and 2,421,010 were gained. There you had a net loss of 382,380 low-wage jobs. But that's only 10% of the net loss of mid-wage jobs. The failure of mid-wage jobs to come back is absolutely staggering. Jarod Lanier sees this through the lens (indeed) of Kodak vs. Instagram, or music file-sharing etc. Yet he's basically right, you just have to amplify his explanation. As the video included with the graphic explains, both mid-wage manufacturing jobs and a host of white-collar service jobs have either been outsourced or automated (or both, for that matter: there is a lot of partial automation, so that one worker in China or India can do what ten used to do in the US). Web 2.0 functions have indeed made many white-collar workers redundant. It's technological unemployment with a vengeance. This heralds a major change in US society, and undoubtedly the same applies to European societies after austerity is over (if ever). I believe that what happened - why we didn't see this coming - is that the stagnation of mid-wage earnings was compensated by credit and rising home equity for a generation, from the mid-1980s to 2007. Then the Great Recession (or Depression, or Repression, or whatever you wanna call it) came and choked back all that credit and middle-class wealth-effects. The entire economy of the mid-wage jobs then collapsed: no profit margin for those companies anymore, because sales plunged. It was necessary to implement the automation and outsouring in order for those kinds of businesses to stay afloat. So you still have many of the businesses: just not the jobs. Somebody should research this further, to verify if the Reuteurs article was right, what the comparable situations are in the different advanced economies, etc. I will do so when I have time. Right now I am headed to Spain to look at the future up close. all the best, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
Brian: Let's get to work on this. Great idea! But, before you roll up your sleeves, if you want to have any useful ideas on the structure of labor (and leisure and consumption) then you must begin with a CRASH effort to understand the impact of *digital* technology on the economy. Are you prepared to do that? You and what ARMY? g Economists -- including the heterodox ones -- uniformly treat technology as an externality. That means there is no place in their models or narratives for fundamental technological change. When I asked the editor of Real World Economics Review last year if he had *ever* (in 10+ years) had any articles submitted to him about these basic relationships his answer was No, why don't you submit one? When I asked a fellow I know who sees most of the grant requests for new economic research if he has seen *any* applications to study this his answer was, Not one -- all we're seeing now are people who are interested in studying complexity. Sociologists convinced themselves 40 years ago that it would be better to be constuctivist instead of operational and have steadfastly clung to the CONDEMNATION of anyone who proposes a primary role for technology as being a determinist -- including on this list. Recently a group (mostly in the UK) have launched a sub-field called Digital Anthropology with a book of that name. From what I can tell, their work is interesting but its still doing anthropology *about* activities that occur when using digital stuff (therefore attracting companies who make that stuff) -- not FLIPPING the inquiry to ask how digital technology should drive a reexamination of anthropology itself. Before the rise of post-modern social science in the 1970s, there was a very lively discussion about what technology was doing to the economy and society. Post-Vietnam that discussion *stopped* and has not been revived since. What was once called post-industrial -- which is in fact what is going on not over-devlopment, making it *unexplored* territory for those who try to understand industrial economics -- then became late-stage capitalism or neo-liberalism, which *deliberately* obscures what is happening and recasts the discussion in terms of a political framework that ensures nobody has a clue about what is really happening. Addressing the fundamental issues got re-framed out of consideration by *euphemisms* . . . !! Jaron (who I know pretty well) is a very clever guy who has the benefit of NOT being any of these things. Yes, he's a musician but, more importantly, what he says he just makes up (i.e. rarely footnotes and mostly has no collaborators) and he doesn't care what some *profession* has insisted is the proper method. Good for him. So, is he going to be taken seriously? No. He is mostly being treated as an oddity who, because he comes from the Sili-Valley tech industry (a point he highlights repeatedly in his book) gets attention for being anti-technology. And, he's not alone in the category of what many are calling (inaccurately) neo-luddites. MAN bites DOG (i.e. Internet destroyed the middle class) . . . reads the headline! If you want to get to work on the problem of a disappearing middle-class (which, as an *industrial* artifact should be *expected* to disappear when the economy shifts to post-industrial) then you'd better explore the factors that are driving the tectonic shifts in the economy. Are you (or anyone else) ready to do that? Or, would you prefer to talk about 3D printing and a revival of (industrial) manufacturing . . . ?? g Recently, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen published their The New Digital Age, in which they argue that we now live in two *civilizations* -- one physical and the other virtual. So what are the economic, social and psychological implications of living in two very DIFFERENT worlds? Any takers? I've written a review (unpublished) of the book that focuses on this question but I've watched/read a dozen interviews/reviews and NONE of them have dealt with this at all. It seems to go right over their heads. The name of this list is NETTIME. The implication is that there is something *different* about living in NET time, as opposed to other sorts of time -- but what are they? Who has the *courage* to tackle these questions? Without doing this, all the calls to get to work will be just more impassioned chatter and breast-pounding . . . !! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
The middle class is of course a construct. It seems to me what is happening in the disappearance of that class is that we simply can no longer pretend it has an existence beyond a political will to work with this construct. And did the idea of the middle class not result from a desire to make a system of economic exchange--never pure, always haunted by symbolic exchange, as Baudrillard reminds us, by the sovereign word--politically legitimate by stating that most of us, i.e.the middle class, are actually protected from the inevitable cruelty of such a system? That this cruelty does not concern us? That it is truly only the very poor and the very rich who are affected by the negation of social time generated by economic exchange, that is is they who live on borrowed time, either worrying about how to buy the next meal, or about how not to lose their riches and stay out of prison? In my view, the reason that this fiction is crumbling, and with it the power of all those politicians who present themselves as advocates of the middle class (cf. the rise of the right in EU and the US, return to socialism in South America) does indeed have to do with digital technology because of its inherent difficulty of representing scarcity. And without scarcity, we may not need a global system economic exchange, and no sovereign intervening in it because you share, and that is something completely different. Perhaps we understand more about the disappearance of the middle class if we look at the economy from a point of view of excess and abundance. Bataille's idea that the most fundamental problem of humankind is not necessity, but luxury, may provide an entry point to this kind of discussion. Wolfgang ++ http://www.wolfgangsuetzl.net http://www.uibk.ac.at/medien/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime The eyes of the milpa
Dear nettime, Here is a tiny step towards gathering the collective of humans and non-humans... The eyes of the milpa Families from Santa Mar?a Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca (Mexico) use mobile phones to create an online community memory about everything that grows in their fields.? http://ojosdelamilpa.net Los ojos de la milpa (The eyes of the milpa*) is a community memory that captures, through images and voice recordings, a moment of transition in these complex times. It all takes place somewhere in the mountains of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a community where the elders tell stories to the youth about how maize was planted many years ago: without fertilizers or sophisticated technology. The young ones listen as they witness how maize can no longer grow without chemical fertilizers, nor survive without synthetic pesticides. This is a place where the precious pace of the passing seasons coexists with a growing pressure to produce more, to extract from the earth not only nourishment, but also more and more profit.? But there are newcomers in the milpa: in the community of Santa Mar?a Tlahuitoltepec Mixe, Oaxaca, peach trees have recently made their appearance. This is thanks to the MIAF system (Milpa Intercropped with Fruit Trees), an agroforestry management proposal developed by researchers from the Postgraduate College of Agronomy at Chapingo, Mexico. In addition to traditional crops such as maize, beans and squash, the MIAF system introduces fruit trees in the milpa to satisfy a number of needs. By forming a live barrier, they help to protect the soil from erosion caused by runoffs, a major problem in Tlahuitoltepec, where arable land is mostly found on hillsides. The trees contribute to carbon sequestration, an important strategy in the context of climate change. Finally, they also strengthen the livelihoods of farmers and their families who eat or sell the fruits, in this case peaches. However, new knowledge, skills and technologies come together with these benefits, involving a tough learning process, an increase in the amount of required labor, and the danger of a greater dependency on external inputs.? In this scenario, Los ojos de la milpa seeks to reveal the tense interweaving of the old and the new. Throughout a crop-growing cycle, families from the Juquila and Santa Ana ranches use smartphones to capture images and record sounds of whatever happens in their milpas, and to post them on this website. By doing this, they share their knowledge, their concerns, their ways of doing and their ways of thinking. They make themselves present by presenting their stories to us, by showing us how they live and work in a community which resists as it transforms. Through their own words and points of view, they leave a testimony of a crucial moment in which the urgency of finding a balance between nature and technology, between culture and productivity, can be felt. * milpa: a crop-growing system formed mainly by maize, beans, chili and squash. Best wishes, and may you have a good harvest. Eugenio. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
